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International Journal of Engineering and Applied Computer Science (IJEACS)

Comparison of Health Care System Architectures


Mahboobeh Abdoos
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Qom Islamic Azad University
Qom, Iran.

AbstractBody area sensor network is an important


technology which is suitable for monitoring the patients health
and real time diagnosing the diseases. The body area network
includes the sensors which can be spread over the body or the
wearable cloth and a coordinator node which can be a mobile
or a tablet or a PDA, which receives the signal of a persons
sensors. In the new architecture the coordinator node sends the
information to the central data server via internet or GPRS or
MANET. The central data server is responsible for saving and
analyzing and representing the received data in the text and
graphical mode and sending SMS to the patients family or the
nearest ambulance or physician, or the operator can call them.
The received information is analyzed by the data mining tools.
The necessary information will be sent to the physicians
computer. Every patient has a GPS, and it is supposed that the
encryption is used for transferring information. In this paper
the new architecture is compared with the traditional one
which includes the base station and relay nodes. It is shown
that the new architecture has less delay than the traditional
one.
Keywords Architecture; Health care; Sensor; MANET

I. INTRODUCTION
The body sensor network can help people by preparing
health care services, like monitoring and communication via
SMS or GPRS. The health monitoring system uses the
wearing cloth which has sensors or the body implanted
sensors. The health care system helps the patients and their
families by monitoring their physiological signal without
interrupting the patients normal life and increasing the
quality of patients life. The health care system does not limit
a patient to stay in the bed and in the current architecture, the
patients physiological signal is received by the patients
sensors and it is transferred to the coordinator node which is
a mobile or tablet, then it is transferred to the far base station
and then to a computer to save and analyze them. In the close
environments, the signal length weakens. Increasing of
Obstacles between nodes causes the increasing of the packets
loss ratio. So it is needed to increase the relay nodes, in the
closed environment, to cover the entire of environment. This
Volume: 01, Issue: 02, December 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9957075-1-1

architecture is dependent to the infrastructure and relay


nodes and base stations and suffers the infrastructure cost.
The proposed architecture eliminates the infrastructure
and the sensor nodes transfer their information to the
coordinator node and the coordinator sends the information
to the central data server via internet or GPRS. The proposed
architecture has less cost and less delay than the old
architecture. In this paper, section 2, surveys the ad hoc
network and some of the routing protocols of it. Section 3
reviews the body area sensor network and health care system
architectures. Section 4 represents the simulation result of
two health care system architectures comparison. There is
shown that the new architecture which uses the internet or
GPRS or MANET to transfer the signal information of
coordinator node (the coordinator is gathering the signal
information of sensors) to the central data server, has less
delay in comparison with the traditional architecture which
uses the base station and relay nodes to transfer the
information of signal to the central data server [1], [2], [3],
[4].
II. AD HOC NETWORK
An ad hoc network consists of some wireless mobile
nodes which route the packets without any infrastructure.
The ad hoc network is divided to static and dynamic ad hoc
networks. In a static ad hoc network, the location of a node
does not change. In the dynamic ad hoc networks the nodes
are moving like the mobile and vehicle ad hoc networks. The
topology of the mobile ad hoc network is changing. There
are two kinds of routing, the first one is the topology based
routing and the second one is the location based routing. The
topology based routing uses the information of links of the
network to transfer the packets. It is divided to the tabledriven and demand based routing protocols. The table-driven
routing protocols consist of the distance-vector protocols and
the link-state protocols [5], [6], [7], [8].
III. ROUTING PROTOCOLS IN AD HOC NETWORKS
A. Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing protocol
(AODV)
AODV uses the combination of demand based routing
(DSR) and hop by hop routing (DSDV). It uses the
sequential number in the table of node. This number is

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Mahboobeh Abdoos

International Journal of Engineering and Applied Computer Science (IJEACS)

produced by the destination node. This number is not in the


route request packet and in the route reply packet and it is
sent to the requested nodes. This number is so important
because it avoids the loop and the other node uses this
number to update its routing information. AODV is
consistent with the routing tables. The route request packets
and the route reply packets and errors are defined like DSR.
The privilege of this approach is the proper throughput, but it
can not find and support and update the long paths.
B. Destination Sequenced Distance Vector Routing
protocol (DSDV)
DSDV is the changed Bellman Ford algorithm. Every
node has the entries for the destination node, which consists
of the next hop and the number of hops to the destination
node. Every node propagates its routing table to its neighbors
to update them. The privilege of DSR is saving the fix paths
to all other nodes of network by a node, but it causes the
wasting of band width and saving the useless paths that may
never are used.

central data server is responsible for saving and analyzing


and representing the received data in the text and graphical
mode and sending SMS to the patients family or the nearest
ambulance or physician or the operator can call them. The
figure 2 shows the new architecture that the patients in the
different locations can use this health care system.
The privilege of this architecture is that it removes the
infrastructure cost of traditional architecture (removes the
base station and relay nodes). The communication between
the coordinator node and the central data server is via
internet or GPRS or MANET and the routing protocols in
MANET like DSDV, DSR, and AODV are used.

C. Dynamic Source Routing Protocol (DSR)


DSR is a routing protocol which can manage the ad hoc
network without needing to routing tables and updating
them. To save the band width, it is done, when just it is
needed. In DSR, the source node defines all of the routes
from source node to the destination node and saves the path
of intermediate nodes. It is a link state algorithm. Every node
saves the best route to the destination node. If any change is
occurred in the network, all nodes of the network are
informed via broadcasting the changes. DSR does not need
to update periodically. The control overhead is little, which
causes saving the band width.
Figure 1. Sensor nodes in the body or wearable cloth and coordinator node
which can be a mobile or a tablet.

IV. NEW ARCHITECTURE


This architecture includes four parts
A. Sensor Nodes
The sensor nodes monitor the main body parameters,
which show the patients health or sickness, like the body
temperature, heartbeat, blood pressure, breathing ratio, blood
oxygen. For example the sensors for monitoring heart beat
are EGG, the sensors for sensing signal of the brain are EEG
and the sensors for sensing signal of the muscles are EMG.
B. Coordinator Node
The coordinator node is a wireless node in the BANET,
which is responsible for receiving signal of sensors and
sending the information to the central data server. This node
can be identified by a unique patients ID. This node can be a
mobile or tablet that uses the internet or GPRS or MANET to
send the information to the central data server. (See figure 1)
[9], [10], [11], [12]
C. Central Data Server
This server saves the received information to process
later. The data mining is a useful tool for analyzing the huge
amount of information. The graphical user interface in the
Volume: 01, Issue: 02, December 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9957075-1-1

Figure 2. Traditional health care system architecture which uses the relay
nodes to transfer information to the central data server.

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38

Mahboobeh Abdoos

International Journal of Engineering and Applied Computer Science (IJEACS)

Figure 5. Delay comparison of two architectures

VI. CONCLUSION

Figure 3. New health care system architecture which does not use the relay
nodes to transfer information to the central data server

V. THE SIMULATION ENVIRONMENT


The simulation is done in NS2. The simulation scope is
15001500 meters in 200 seconds. In this simulation, it is
used the IEEE 802.11 protocol in the MAC layer and the
band width is 2 Mbps. The data packets size is 512 byte and
the CBR traffic is used. The packets sending rate is 4 packets
in a second. In simulation running, the random way point
model is used for moving the nodes. The nodes maximum
radio range is 200 meters. The nodes number in this
simulation is 100 and the nodes speed are 10 m/s and 1 m/s
for the first and second scenarios. As it is shown, in the
figure 4, when the speed of nodes is increasing the
probability of fast packets transferring to the neighbor nodes
and the delay is increasing. By comparing the architectures,
it is shown that the new architecture has less delay than the
traditional architecture.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are finding


applications in many areas, such as medical monitoring,
emergency response, security, industrial automation,
environment and agriculture, seismic detection, infrastructure
protection and optimization, automotive and aeronautic
applications, building automation, and military applications.
The body area sensor network is an important technology
that is suitable for monitoring the patient health and real time
diagnosing the diseases. The body area network includes the
sensors which can be spread over the body or the wearable
cloth and a coordinator node that can be a mobile or a tablet
or a PDA that receives the person sensors signal. In the new
architecture the coordinator node sends the information to
the central data server via internet or GPRS or MANET. The
central data server is responsible for saving and analyzing
and representing the received data in the text and graphical
mode and sending SMS to the patients family or the nearest
ambulance or physician, or the operator can call them. The
received information is analyzed by the data mining tools.
The necessary information will be sent to the physicians
computer. Every patient has a GPS, and it is supposed that
the encryption is used for transferring information. In this
paper the new architecture is compared with the traditional
one which includes the base station and the relay nodes. It is
shown that the new architecture has less delay than the
traditional one.
REFERENCES
[1]

Stanford V, Using pervasive computing to deliver elder care, IEEE


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Figure 4. Scenarios delay comparison of new architecture.

Volume: 01, Issue: 02, December 2016


ISBN: 978-0-9957075-1-1

Mahboobeh Abdoos

International Journal of Engineering and Applied Computer Science (IJEACS)

[5]

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[10] Lai CC, Lee RG, Hsiao CC, Liu HS, Chen CC ,A H-QoS-demand
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AUTHOR PROFILE
Mahboobeh Abdoos received the B.S and M.S
degrees in computer engineering from Azad
University, Ghazvin, Iran, in 2002 and 2007
respectively. She is now the Ph.D. research student
of Islamic Azad university, Qom, Iran. She has
taught at Islamic Azad and Payam Nour
Universities from 2005 til now. She has been the
referee of some conferences. Her current research
interest includes position based routing protocols in mobile ad hoc
networks, QOS and security based routing protocols in mobile ad hoc
networks, cloud computing and data base.

2016 by the author(s); licensee Empirical Research Press Ltd. United Kingdom. This is an open access article
distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons by Attribution (CC-BY) license.
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Volume: 01, Issue: 02, December 2016


ISBN: 978-0-9957075-1-1

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